Paul Winter’s Earth Music

By Anastasia Stanmeyer

At 23, he performed the first-ever jazz concert at the White House for Jackie Kennedy. In his 30s, he played saxophone to whales off Canada’s coast. Astronauts took a cassette of his album to the moon. The seven-time Grammy® winner is our neighbor and will be performing in Great Barrington this December.

TO VISIT SAXOPHONIST, BANDLEADER, AND COMPOSER PAUL WINTER is to become an active participant—in exploring his incredible barn of music, in making music on the fly, in listening deeply, in discussing the symphony of creatures on our planet, in digging into blueberry muffins and coffee. His body of work chronicles his wide-ranging experiences in the musical traditions and natural environments. 

Paul Winter in his barn surrounded by large Woodstock Chimes, which their creator, Garry Kvistad, calls “big tubes." (Gregory Cherin) 

For this interview, I was joined by David Rothenberg, a friend and professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, with a special interest in animal sounds as music. He is also a composer and jazz musician whose books and recordings reflect a deep interest in understanding other species by making music with them. David was greatly influenced at a young age by Paul’s Common Ground album and more than pleased to join me. 

Not only did I go into this interview in good company, it was also good timing. On Saturday, November 29, at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Paul Winter Consort will present the concert premiere of Paul's new album, Horn of Plenty, which will be released November 21. And on Saturday, December 20, the Paul Winter Consort Winter Solstice Celebration will be at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, featuring vocalist Theresa Thomason, Eugene Friesen on cello, Bulgarian bassist Peter Slavov, Brazilian pianist Henrique Eisenmann, German percussionist Bertram Lehmann, and Paul on soprano sax. This is the third year that Paul has celebrated the winter solstice at Saint James Place, which seats about 250 people. “It's so beautiful,” he says about the venue. “And for an instrumental musician, a place with those kind of acoustics is a kind of heaven.” 

It was just shy of an hour’s drive from my office in Great Barrington to Paul’s home in the Litchfield woods—a massive 1917 horse barn that is his studio and is located along with his house on 120 acres. This has been his home for 50 years. On a cloudy early fall morning, I pull up to the barn and phone Paul to let him know that we are there. He steps out of the massive building and gives us both a big smile, a warm hug, and leads us into his world. 

The next few hours with Paul was like no other interview I’ve had. I was an active participant from the minute I walked through those barn doors. He takes David and me upstairs, and we start at a corner of the barn that is lined with larger-than-life Woodstock Chimes, which are called “big tubes” by their creator, Garry Kvistad. We stand and admire their magnificence, and then Paul hands me two soft mallets. “Just swat them hard, as hard as you can, on the tops,” he tells me. “It doesn’t matter what order, but get them all going, and just lie down and listen.” 

Lie down? All right, whatever you say, Paul. As I swat them, he walks over to me with a blue mat, takes the mallets from my hands, and gestures me to stretch out on the floor. I close my eyes and listen. The bell sounds turned into vibrations—the sound waves infiltrate my body and invite me to relax. It’s hard to put it into words, and maybe that’s Paul’s whole point—that our listening faculty has been grossly underutilized when, in fact, it may be needed now more than ever. 

“Why do we like it? Why do we love feelings like that?” Paul asks afterwards. “I'm interested in all the possible answers, and in the question that is it possible that the aural faculty could be a saving grace for our wayward species. We've used everything we can in the visual realm, in the intellectual now, we've got AI coming and have gone way beyond the limits in that realm. The aural is completely forgotten in our culture.” 

Paul criticizes modern culture's over-reliance on the visual and intellectual realms, neglecting heard experiences that can provide deep, non-visual experiences remembered long after other forms of information are forgotten. He believes in the potential of music to bring people together and foster shared experiences. Incorporating nature into music is an expansion of the community of voices, he says. In other words, music has the potential to inspire positive change and promote environmental awareness. 

We continue our tour of his barn, which houses decades of work and collaborations that span this musician’s artistic life. We stop at old posters, musical instruments of many genres, boxes upon boxes of research paper covering the expansive floor, and so much more. We end the tour where we began, in his recording room. I examine stacks upon stacks of CDs that fill a few of the shelves—solo recordings of his and those with his Paul Winter Consort. (He has released 54 albums.) We settle into our talk with a concert grand piano within arm’s length away. 

Along one wall are boxes filled with files labeled “Tanzania,”“Kenya,” “Uganda,” “Malawi,” “Zimbabwe,” “Turkey,” “Lebanon,” “Bulgaria,” and so on. On a table are piles of folders labeled “Flyways.” All this material is part of Paul’s album project that has been in the works for 20 years, celebrating the Great Rift Valley bird migration from Africa through the Middle East to Eurasia—one of the most important bird migration corridors on earth. The project uses music from the cultures over which the birds fly, combined with the sounds of the birds themselves, to create a collaborative and international musical composition performed by the Paul Winter Consort and various indigenous guest musicians from the 16 countries of the flyway. “We hope to finish volume one in 2026, which is called African Odyssey,” says Paul. Subsequent volumes will include the countries of the Mideast and Eurasia. 

He hands me an early CD of Horn of Plenty that he signs “In Celebration.” And it truly is. On it, he performs on his soprano sax with his Consort and special guests from Brazil, Russia, Ireland, Romania, and Armenia, along with the voices of dolphins, wood thrush, blue whales, and timber wolves. There is a piece called “Song to Roger,” a nod to the late Roger Payne, who recorded the humpback whale in the game-changing 1970 album Song of the Humpback Whale. 

Paul has so many stories to tell behind each song and each project that he is working on. One such story goes back eight years ago. A wood thrush arrived at his Litchfield home one June morning and sang a song he had not heard before. Paul was fascinated by it and would listen every morning and evening. One morning, he went to the piano and realized that the bird was singing in the key of C. Incredible. Paul placed a DAT machine at the base of the tree and recorded every morning. Five years in a row, the bird came back every June and sang that same song in C major. When Paul finally got a good recording, he played along with it with his soprano saxophone. “He sings four phrases,” explains Paul. “Each one is three notes. The three notes of each phrase outline a triad, a chord, and the four chords, I realized, were the same first four chords of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. So, I created this piece with a Brazilian feel to reflect the joy of his singing.”

And we sit there, listening to this beautiful piece of music called “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” from Horn of Plenty. Afterwards, I turn to the liner notes for the piece and read the listed artists: Wood Thrush: vocal; Paul Winter: soprano sax; Eugene Friesen: cello; Henrique Eisenmann: fortepiano; Peter Slavov: bass; and Rogerio Boccato: drums. The composers of this song? Wood Thrush, J.S. Bach, and Paul Winter. The description of the piece ends with this: “I had this fantasy that ol’ J.S. and the Wood Thrush stumble into a little Brazilian party, and a good time is had by all.” 

With a half-eaten muffin in my one hand and a notebook in my other, recorder resting on the arm of my chair, we begin the interview.

Anastasia: Why did you choose this location to make it your home? 

Paul: I’m from Altoona, a small railroad city in the middle of Pennsylvania. After that, I was in school in Chicago, and then I came to New York for three years and got out as quickly as I could. I drove to Weston, Connecticut, to visit Dave Brubeck. When I drove up in my car, Dave was out in the front yard putting up a snow fence for his little child. My jazz sextet had played in a couple festivals with the Brubeck Quartet the previous summer, so I knew him just a little bit. He was very cordial, and we talked for a half hour. He said, “I do about 100 concerts a year, and most of them I can drive to from here,” and I saw my future in that sentence. That was 1963. In ’65, I came out to Weston and found a cottage in the woods where I lived for two years. I came up to Redding, Connecticut, one time to visit Mary Travers, who was a friend because my first band had toured with Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved it because it was a much more rural area. The day I moved into a cottage on a farm there, my landlady said, “Oh yeah, there was another musician who used to live on this road. His name was Charles Ives.” For seven years, I jogged every day past the mailbox that said “Ives.”

David: You just played this beautiful piece of music combining Bach, Brazilian vibe, and this special wood thrush. Do you think Bach and Brazilian music have any special connection to nature?

Paul: A knee-jerk answer would be no more than any other music. But then, I think about what I love about each of these genres. The forms in Bach and the journey he makes harmonically have a kinship to forms in nature. In that sense, I would say that there's a great kinship between the profound intelligence in the universe and Bach. In Brazil, people live much more in nature. Their emotions are much more out there than we Northerners. There is a great deal more joy happening in their lives.

David: You first went to Brazil in the 1960s, sent by the State Department, which used to send jazz musicians around the world. Had you thought much about Brazilian music before you went?

Paul: Not until the night before the trip. Gene Lees, who was editor of DownBeat, was coming with us on our six-month State Department tour. The night before we left, Gene played us an album called Chega de Saudade by João Gilberto, a great singer, and we were completely beguiled. We had never heard anything like that. I was 21, and the music I loved at the time was brash bebop jazz. And there was this gentle music that had seemed to have an equivalent amount of soul as the hard-driving music, but it was very subtle, with beautiful harmonic motion. That was January 31, 1962, and we weren't going to hit Brazil until June, after having to go through Central America and down the West Coast of South America and coming up from Argentina and Uruguay into Brazil finally. So for five months, we just couldn't wait to get to Brazil. 

Paul was drawn to return to Brazil in 1964 because of the music. That’s when the idea of a consort began formulating, a term borrowed from ensembles of Shakespeare’s day. Since its beginning, the Paul Winter Consort has had the core instrumentation of cello, English horn/oboe, alto or soprano sax, classical guitar or piano, acoustic bass, and a vast variety of percussion. In 1968, Paul began introducing free improvisation into the Consort's concerts as a way for the group to truly loosen up and explore. The band performs one "free piece" with all the lights turned out in most every concert.

David: Why did you decide jazz was not your world when you were doing so well with it?

Paul: It was a series of things. My sextet was really a partnership between me and a trumpet player named Dick Witzel, who was a couple years older than me, and whom I met the first month I was at college at Northwestern. He became my best friend, my partner in this group, and he was my mentor for jazz. We didn't know much beyond Stan Kenton's band and Benny Goodman. 

The Paul Winter Sextet emerged in Chicago during Paul’s years at Northwestern University. After winning the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, the band was signed to Columbia Records by legendary producer John Hammond. In 1962 the sextet recorded its first three albums, and, on recommendation from festival judges Dizzy Gillespie and Hammond, was sent by the State Department on a six-month tour of 23 countries of Latin America. 

Paul: We had a successful State Department tour, but nobody back home knew about it. The one place that did was the White House, where I had written a letter to JFK in the middle of our tour, saying that this was a great idea to send a student jazz group out. I wrote that the tour was going very, very well and saluted him for what the cultural exchange program was doing. That August, we got an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to play at the White House in a series of concerts called Concerts for Young People by Young People. It was only classical music, but because our group had been so successful in Latin America, they thought, well, let's take a chance on a jazz group. Jazz was very much an underground thing then. They had only invited famous groups before that. So, we played the White House in November of ’62, and the next morning, the news of the concert was on the front page across the country: “Jackie Digs Jazz.” From the publicity of that, we got a tour of clubs around the country.

Anastasia: Who was in the group?

Paul: Dick Witzel on trumpet. Warren Bernhardt on piano. Richard Evans, bass player. Harold Jones, drummer who, after that, went with Count Basie for 15 years. He just finished about 20 years with Tony Bennett before Tony passed. One of the last gigs that we played was at Newport in the summer of ’63. We were driving home, and Dick said, “I'm going to quit music and go to medical school,” because his dad and brother were doctors. We did our last album that fall, which was a celebration of jazz impressions of folk songs. It was at the time of JFK’s assassination, and that completely burst our bubble. I mean, we had been living in an absolute, well, you could say a dream world. Imagine, you're 23 and your president is JFK, and the Peace Corps has just started, and we're reaching out to the world. What an encouraging spirit for a kid to have, and then all of a sudden, it's over. Without Dick, the group didn't make any sense to me anymore. I also was a little bit tired of a lot of the bebop that was going on and a lot of extended soloing that was developing. I loved ensemble music, and I had intended my sextet to be a miniature of a big band. It all shifted around from “us” music to “me” music. And so I was disillusioned with jazz, sick of New York City, and I had this strong allurement to go back to Brazil. It was in Brazil that I first heard Villa-Lobos’s music, the classical music that features cello, and I thought, there's a wonderful instrument I'd never paid attention to before.

David: When did you start thinking that nature had something to teach us musically?

Paul: Hearing the humpback whales on May 27, 1968. Roger Payne, who is celebrated in one of the pieces in my new album, recorded the humpback whales for the album Song of the Humpback Whale, released in 1970. Two years before the album came out, I went to a lecture with him and was completely astounded. Here were these beautiful voices, these beguiling voices that were swooping all over the place, going off the top end, the bottom end of our hearing. And then Roger pointed out that he and Scott McVay had discovered that the whales are repeating these songs, sometimes lasting 30 minutes, as possibly complex as a Beethoven symphony. Here was a creature with an intelligence that nobody had really understood before. The capper at the end was that they were being exterminated quickly to squeeze the last drops out of a dying industry of whaling. I became an activist that night.

David: When Song of the Humpback Whale came out, no one could expect how popular it would be. And then Scott McVay took this record album to Japan, played it for whaling executives, and some burst into tears. It got the world to care. Paul, were you already thinking about a consort, this ensemble that lives together in the countryside and makes music together?

Paul: Part of the influence was when Gary Snyder told me that he was tired of traveling and was going to start doing his workshops at his place in the mountains, in the Sierra Nevada, so that people could experience how to chop wood and carry water. I thought instead of traveling all the time to do my workshops, I'd like to have a place to do them. I came here in ’75 and did the first gathering in ’77, which was the one where we did the Common Ground album. I'll tell you also what it was, and again it was whales. In November ’76, Governor Jerry Brown hosted a three-day conclave called “California Celebrates the Whale” in Sacramento. Out of that came two interesting things: One was that people got together socially, between all the performances and presentations. There was a campaign called “Boycott Japan” because of their whaling. In California, that was awaking a lot of memories of the internment in the ’40s. People were saying, “Hey, that's not the way you transform people. You don't boycott them. Let's go and share what we know about the whales.” It was an amazing idea whose time had come, and it kept growing. The next Easter in ’77, I was on a plane full of California folks, including Jerry Brown and Jackson Browne, Wavy Gravy, Joni Mitchell, Mimi Fariña, and our group. That’s where I met Scott McVay, on the airplane. We were on our way to a seven-day conclave called “Japan Celebrates the Whale and Dolphin” in a dome in Tokyo. It was the first environmental event in Tokyo. We played concerts six nights in a row, and there were talks. A filmmaker named Will Janis who was there wanted to make a film about people interacting with whales in Baja, California, where the great whales come to mate and calve in the wintertime. So he organized a trip there for the next February and invited us to come. 

Paul began developing his SoundPlay approach in 1971 as a result of the Consort’s collective improvising. He conducted hundreds of SoundPlay workshops at music schools, universities, and retreat centers. He led music-making whale-watching expeditions to Baja, California, setting up camp in the dunes along Magdalena Bay, the wintertime habitat of grey whales. This inspired his album Callings, a celebration of sea mammals that features the voices of 13 species. Paul later released two albums inspired by his trips to the Grand Canyon, most notably the 1985 Grammy®-nominated Canyon. He has traveled to at least 52 countries and wilderness areas on six continents for concert tours and recording expeditions. In 1971, The Apollo 15 astronauts carried a cassette copy of the Paul Winter Consort’s live 1970 album, Road, to the moon and named two lunar craters after songs from the album: “Icarus” and “Ghost Beads.” 

David: How did the presence of nature change the music you're making?

Paul: What I love the most is when I feel the music comes forth, especially when we're collectively improvising rather than just playing a written composition … and being outside opens up people in a wonderful way. Every night around the campfire, people would just tell stories. It was remarkable, because there were people who were fairly shy, and you could see them opening up. That encouraged me to do our SoundPlay events outside. I had all these things in mind when I was looking for a place. Then I thought, well, let's see how creative it can be if I get my favorite musicians together, which I did in the summer of ’77, and included composer William Allaudin Mathieu; Noel Paul Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary; and Laudir de Oliveira, a great Brazilian percussionist who was with Chicago. It was a very diverse group of people, and I thought, let's see what happens. For six weeks, I had people in and out of my home here in Litchfield all the time, people like Steve Gadd. I don't know if it changed specifically my playing, but it encouraged me a lot toward what we can do from shared expression.

Anastasia: You played with all these musicians out here. How did you take that next step of bringing nature into your music?

Paul: It’s the same way that I became allured to different jazz players. As a kid, I loved unique sounds. I grew up with a lot of classical music around and played in a symphony in high school. I respected it, but it was jazz players that had a soul in their voices. So, hearing a humpback whale was not really that different than hearing Charlie Parker for the first time. It's just expanding your community of voices.

David: Do you think about that when you encourage people to listen in a deeper way?

Paul: That's my goal. Every year, we do an event that returns to that quest. It's our summer solstice celebration, which we do at 4:30 in the morning, the first Saturday near the summer solstice. This year, it was right on the solstice. It’s total darkness. It’s the most profound event that we do. It's just 90 minutes of stream of music, no talking, no breaks, no lights. The whole nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which itself is a football field long, is cordoned off for yoga mats. So we have 65 yoga mat places, people lie down, and they listen. We start at 4:30 and by around 5:15, we all become aware that the stained glass windows are starting to illuminate with the first sunrise of the summer, and then it's just this crescendo of light that you can't really duplicate with a light show. It's pretty hard to imitate nature in that way …. What I like is the fact that we have this faculty of accepting what's happening in nature that we don't use indoors. For example, if we take a walk in the woods, you're hearing a lot of things. You're hearing the brush underfoot, you're hearing the wind in the trees, you’re hearing some birds, a plane. And have you ever heard anybody say, “Oh, I wish that bird had not sung at that point. That was a terrible place. Why didn't he wait?” No, we join it all. We accept it all. Take a dog, and the dog is accepting everything now, now, now. Everything's fine in the present. It's just what's happening. We go inside and we're taught no, no, music has to be this way. These are the rules, and you have to play like this. And you're going to take lessons for the next seven years. Then you're going to get a chance to play with somebody and maybe have some fun. Until then, do this. 

Anastasia: You wish that would change?

Paul: To educate diverse group of people in an institution, you have to have structure. The thing about school is you can learn a lot of structure, but you can't learn freedom. You’ve got to find out on your own, which is why I encourage people to make their own groups, create their own music.

Anastasia: What do you see as your purpose in this world, Paul?

Paul: It’s first to create the most sublime music that I can and to share it with people however I can. My favorite music is living polyphony, ensemble music that's created collectively.

Paul Winter Sextet, Saugatuck, Michigan, 1961. ( Paul Winter Collection)

David: Do you hear living polyphony in nature?

Paul: God, yes. Each thing holding forth according to their nature, but in consort. What better definition of democracy could there be? Where the good of the whole is the prime value, yet equally, it’s the expression of each of the individuals. So, we can't really say which is more important, but they're equally important, and they coexist. That's the idea of a thriving life. Anastasia, you asked me my goals. That's one of them, to encourage people—even benevolently trick them—into where their listening will come alive. Here's something that's completely natural, healthy, inexpensive that we don't access. We’ve become total visual people. Now, I realize that the visual faculty is in our evolution more predominant than the aural. We're not called upon to use our listening in the ways that we live. I certainly do have pointed comments about what I feel mass media has done to our self-dependence or our own intelligence. We've given over and become sheep. But it's just the way technology has raced ahead so far, so fast.

Anastasia: What do we do?

Paul: With my albums, I often encourage people to just please listen, lying down in the dark. Even just lying down is a totally different way to listen. You don't listen with your cerebral cortex when you're lying down, so this whole realm in your imagination awakens. I found over the years that these SoundPlay workshops have been a great way to explore and prove this— that our posture, or the way we physically are when we're listening, makes a big difference. Lying down in the dark is the deepest; just lying down by itself is fine. Sitting on the floor is a very different posture than sitting in chairs. I finally realized that this may be because when we go to school at the age of six, usually for the next 16 years, we're sitting in chairs, in rows, watching and listening. We develop a certain modality of experiencing that has the pressure of, okay, don't get emotional. Don't express yourself. Don't be wrong. Get the right answer. Think about sitting on the floor, which we did when we were little kids, and that sort of beginner's mind comes back. It's a physical thing. So, please just listen rather than think your way through.

Anastasia: You’ve got this album coming out, and your Flyways project. What else is keeping you busy?

Paul Winter outside of his home in  Litchfield, Connecticut. (Gregory Cherin)

Paul: The Charles Ives Show album is one thing. In 1974, at his 100th birthday, we did an event on the hillside at his home, 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning in August called The Charles Ives Show with my ensemble and 10 other musicians. It was a very unique and spirited event, we recorded it, and the album was stopped by a publisher at that time and never came out. It’s finally going to come out, and it’s now grown into a larger project. It’s a four-disc set. The first disc is of the event, and the three other discs are things that happened subsequently that are related to Ives. It will be out next spring, prior to the 250th anniversary of our country. Another album waiting in the wings is of Bach pieces that we recorded in the cathedral. The next is called Earth Child, which has been brewing for about 20 years. The idea is that the earth is a child of the sun and a child that we have a responsibility to take care of. It will feature a diversity of voices from the cultures and creatures of the earth.

Anastasia: Are you happy with how your career has evolved?

Paul: That’s a great question. First of all, I've never thought of it as a career. It's a calling. It's not something that I chose; it's something that chose me. As a career, I would think people would say, "This is no way to have a stable future, the music business." When I was growing up, nobody ever imagined a livelihood in music. You did something responsible, like law. I actually was registered in law school when my group won its recording contract with Columbia. I said, “Oh, maybe I'll take a year off before law school.” I realized that I could do far more in cultural exchange with music than I ever could as an international lawyer in the world. I feel like I’m the luckiest guy that has ever lived.

David: Do you think the music world understands what you're doing? 

Paul Winter shaking Jacqueline Kennedy's hand as part of the Paul Winter Sextet at The White House, Washington, D.C., 1962. (Paul Winter Collection) 

Paul: Very little.

David: Why do you think that is?

Paul: They’re all in different camps. The orchestral people are in their world, and it's a rich world. What more do you need? If those sounds and those usages of those instruments satisfy you in that extraordinary music that's been written in Europe, then why bother to listen to anything else? For over a half a century, I’m in a band without a genre. I've got one foot in jazz, but it's a bigger world to me than jazz. 

David: If you're going to put your music in a genre, where would you place it? 

Paul: There isn't an existing box. World music is not accurate. First of all, in this country, to be world music, you need to be foreign from here. For a number of years, our music was lumped into that. In the mid-’80s, it became a genre relating to music for meditation. It was mostly acoustic music, and so people looked around and said, “Oh, these guys have been playing acoustic instrumental music for 20 years, so they must be the fathers of ‘New Age,’” which we didn't feel comfortable with. But marketing needs boxes, so they try to put stuff in boxes. Up until that time, our music never had any place in record stores. We would sometimes be in the folk bin or the jazz or classical. Then it became New Age. So for a while, our music got put into that, and we were put into that category in Grammy® voting. But it's not a genre that really explains us. I used to respond to that question by saying, “Well, it's simple. It’s contemporary contrapuntal Connecticut country consort music.” 

On Saturday, November 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave., New York City, the Paul Winter Consort will present the concert premiere of Paul's new album, Horn of Plenty. More information and tickets are at 

stjohndivine.org.

On Saturday, December 20, at 7 p.m., the Paul Winter Consort returns to Saint James Place, 352 Main St., Great Barrington to celebrate the winter solstice. They will perform traditional winter solstice pieces in the midst of a raft of new compositions. They include “Tomorrow Is My Dancing Day,” “Sound Over All Waters,” “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush,” “The Rain Is Over and Gone,” “Wolf Eyes,” and “Icarus.” Tickets can be purchased at saintjamesplace.net.

Other performances coming up include The Great Hall in Needham, Massachusetts, on 

December 6; Cathedral of St Paul in Burlington, Vermont, on December 13; Woolsey Hall, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 19; and Bombyx Center in Florence, Massachusetts, on December 21.

For more reading on Paul Winter, check out the excellent book, The Musical Work of Paul Winter, by Bob Gluck.

Grammy®-winning albums and more by Paul Winter: 

Miho: Journey to the Mountain (2011): Awarded Best New Age Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. The album was recorded inside the Miho Museum in Japan.

Crestone (2008): Won Best New Age Album at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards. This Paul Winter Consort album celebrates the natural world of Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Great Sand Dunes, and San Luis Valley.

Silver Solstice (2006): This live album by the Paul Winter Consort won Best New Age Album at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards. It was recorded at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Celtic Solstice (2000): Awarded Best New Age Album at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards. Winter collaborated with Celtic musicians like Joanie Madden and Eileen Ivers on this album.

Prayer for the Wild Things (1995): Won Best New Age Album at the 37th Annual Grammy Awards. The album was conceived as a companion to a painting by Bev Doolittle and features sounds of nature from the Rocky Mountains.

Spanish Angel (1994): A live album by the Paul Winter Consort that won Best New Age Album at the 36th Annual Grammy Awards. The album was recorded in various Spanish opera houses and concert halls during the Consort's 1992 tour of Spain.

Pete, which won the Grammy® for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1996, featuring Pete Seeger. Paul produced the album.

Icarus is considered one of Paul’s most influential and critically acclaimed works, although it didn’t win a Grammy®. Perhaps an even greater honor was a comment by George Martin, who called Icarus "the finest album I've ever produced.”